Dunkleys

I'm Alex MacArthur, co-owner of MacArthur Davis Marketing. We're a marketing business approaching six years in business ourselves. We provide marketing consultancy and full-service marketing support. Over the last couple of years, our biggest challenge has been moving from being a contractor-based business to an employer.

So what I mean by that is most of our business has been founded on using suppliers or freelancers or lots of different contractors. Some of the challenges we faced with being a contractor business was not having people on site, having communication issues, and fundamentally, not really being part of the team. So as we look to build our business as an employer, we now face a whole load of different challenges. PAYE, HR, consultancy, legislation, employee benefits, all those things that are needed to really build a team as part of the growth of the business.

So when we set up the business, we went to see Dunkleys straight away. It was very much a personal relationship. Richard, the co-owner of the business, knew Mike Dunkley very well, and he always felt that actually we needed accountants by our side right from the start. They have been a great source of support for us.

While we're very lucky in that we are able to manage a lot of the accounting side ourselves, actually, fundamentally, like any small business, it just gets to the point where it becomes too big to manage. And it's more than just doing the accounts. It's getting to the stage where we've become an employer and we employ our first person. Well, how do you do that?

What do you need to do? What's the best way of doing that? All that advice is there on tap, and we also know that there's much more support there if needed. Effectively, we sell time and knowledge.

Those are the two things we sell, and I think our biggest challenge has always been to value that time. So quite early on, we looked into using an online software that would allow us to do that. So we use something called Harvest, which is a time management system which can be used either on the computer or on a mobile app, which is brilliant. We were, like many small businesses I'm sure, spending hours at the end of every month processing all of our invoicing and all of our receipts and everything, and actually, you can do that with Xero, which talks to Harvest.

We can get invoices out really, really quickly. So it's saved us so much time. I think the biggest challenge for small businesses is understanding all the different software out there and choosing the right one for you. That in itself can be very time-consuming, and this is where a relationship with somebody like Dunkleys can be really, really helpful.

They use Xero, they've endorsed Xero, and it makes it so much easier for us.